A good piece and I particularly liked the Boll quote. I seem to remember reading one of Lindsey's novels some years ago. However, you've sparked my interest, which is what a good teacher is supposed to do. I shall look him up.
I enjoyed the fictional characters discussing an interview with a novelist by someone who may or may not have been real.
The "narrative of inaccuracies" is always a problem, particularly with the contemporary history of reporters and pundits.
You'll notice how often on this list - and others - people post an article, or a link to it, in order to emphasize a point with which they agree. This, as if their beliefs are somehow confirmed by the writer. (Very occasionally, a post contradicts the belief of the poster - which is a delight - but it happens rarely.)
I think a case to point is my discussion with Karen over the Florida fiasco. I had the opportunity to watch the events unfolding by the minute - courtesy of C-Span.
It was fascinating, though it cut severely into my work-day. I also read Florida election law. I think the end of the count (seven days after the event) is a bit ambiguous, but it may be a matter of statute - or my poor research. The 11th day announcement is clearly part of the law. This is where the Florida Supremes prevented the Secretary of State from announcing the result. Manifestly, an unlawful act. They had no jurisdiction - noted by the US Supreme Court no less than twice. The first time was ignored by the Florida Supremes.
So, I would argue that the whole thing becomes moot.
Karen was a little put out because, essentially, I refused to go past the clearly visible into the morass of charges, counter-charges, maneuvering, dubious voting procedures, equally dubious legalities, and the rest.
I know that's where the fun is, but I would say it has nothing to do with the clear record of Florida election law.
The numerous articles and several books that have been written in exhausting detail are no more than (perhaps) interesting. The baskets of hypotheses, conjectures, guesses, can mostly be thrown out with the trash.
Yet, Ray says I "bought" what happened in Florida. I wonder what he read that filled him with "particles of truth".
This discussion on Florida began with an awful article that definitively showed that Bush had stolen the election. Will the author's facts (that used to be surmises) add particles of truth to the soup? I say sadly - probably yes.
With regard to the errors in the actual voting, is this something we will experience more and more as people are dragged down to the polling station to make their mark, then go home to their television program? People who regard the election with the same profundity that causes them to support the Angels over the Giants?
I understand that in Oregon there are no polling booths. Voting is done by mail.
Voters need not make the arduous trip to the local polling station - perhaps missing apart of Jeopardy, or Wheel of Fortune.
And so it goes. Perhaps Scaramouche was right. As Sabatini wrote:
"He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."
Harry
Brian wrote:
At 5:34 PM -0700 10/20/02, Karen Watters Cole wrote:It would be nice to hear from the many other FWers who read but do not speak up at all or infrequently, but even if everyone else maintains this same simple two-dimensional perspective, it doesn't change the fact that history teaches that there is always more than one side to the truth.
Hi Karen,
I read more fiction than NEWS which allows me to share this little gem. (I won't attempt a synopsis of the novel. Check this website out if you want more context:)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/books/0553289640/reviews/ref=pm_dp_ln_b_6/102-7645177-8065762
An excerpt from the novel:
Body of Truth
David Lindsey
1992 Doubleday
p. 247- 248
"This is a mad society. We do things like this . . ." Grajeda let the words fade away, his eyes settling on the scattered newspapers. Then he looked up. "Do you read very much, Mr. Haydon? Fiction, I mean?"
"Some."
Do you know the novels of Heinrich Boll?"
"I've read Group Portrait with Lady and The Clown."
"Really?" Grajeda smiled hugely, surprised. He almost laughed.
"How interesting. I am surprised. I mean . . ."
"I have a degree in literature,"Haydon said, himself amused at Grajeda's reaction. "I didn't come out of the womb a policeman."
This time Grajeda did laugh. "This is a wonderful thing," he said.
"What . . . Ah . . ."
"My father was a well-read man," Haydon said. "He had an excellent library, which I still have, and certain ideas about what an educated man should be. I got a degree in literature, which was fine with him, but it wasn't what he had wanted for me. He was a lawyer, and he wanted me to be a lawyer too. I entered law school and stayed two years. But I walked away from it. Then I joined the police force."
Grajeda listened to this brief biography with an expression of delight. "What a wonderful story," he said. "I am happy to hear it." He looked at Haydon, smiling, the surprise still in his eyes. Then he caught himself. "So, good, you know the man, then, Heinrich Boll. I once read an interview with Boll in which the interviewer asked him if he thought of written history as lies. He said, no, not lies perhaps, but it is more like a narrative of inaccuracies in as much as one can never precisely reconstruct it, and it therefore contains untruths. Boll said that, at bottom, truth was an 'assembled' thing. That it could not be found in one place, not in one book, one man's perspective, not in one man's testimony, or one government's history. These he implied, were only particles of truth. They had to be assembled, collated to get at the greater thing itself. I thought about that a lot after I read it. It is such an obvious thing, yet until someone says it right out like that one seems not to be cognizant of it. It seems to me that all too often we go through life holding only the particles in our hands, thinking all along that we possess the whole thing itself.
"Boll said that truth was so difficult to get at because the documents that we gather together in order to assemble the truth may not in themselves by truthful to begin with. He says that we know that governments and statesmen lie to each other and that these lies sometimes are recorded (as truth, of course) in documents which we then assemble (unaware of their deceit) like so many particles, and with the best intentions, into a body of 'truth' that really is not the truth at all."
Grajeda looked at Haydon a moment. "And there you have it," he said. "The death and resurrection of Lena Muller, so intertwined with the death of XX that we may never know Boll's 'assembled truth.' It may not be possible to discover even in a thousand years. We, you and I, are principals in this story, a story that hasn't yet finished being told, and even we don't know the pieces of truth that fall within our own purview. As a matter of fact, you are here now, trying to decipher the lies that you have been told, in search of the truth. We have even contributed to the lies . . . or, forgive me, at least I have. It's a shameful thing, really, what habitual deceit can do to people, even a whole people, like Guatemalans . . . or Americans."
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